How to Extract Still Shots With Your Camcorder

With the prices of digital cameras and camcorders falling constantly, it is common for you to own several. You might use a normal digital camera in order to record film, and afterwards, you realize you prefer to have one of the images as a still shot. This is also accomplished with a camcorder. There are several ways to do this, but the easiest is converting a print screen image by following these how-to steps.

1. First: Take a print screen

   One of the simplest ways to change a moving image into a still shot is by loading the video onto your computer. As you are watching it, stop it at the exact moment the image you are interested in appears. After doing this, you can take a print screen image of your entire computer screen. This is very easy to do by simply opening an image program and pressing the print screen, or "prt scr," key on your keyboard.

2. Second: Crop the image

   After taking the print screen. you are left with an image that includes the final image you want. Unfortunately, you are now also left with the entire screen of your computer, and this is not what you want. You simply need to crop out the extra image from your computer, and you are left with only the image that was originally a recording.

3. Third: Finalize your image

   Depending on the skill level that you have with computers, you may or may not have completed the process. If you are interested in doing more with your image, you need to have some type of photo editing software, where you can tweak the lighting and other traits of your picture. This type of software would include Corel Paint Shop Pro, Adobe Photoshop, Gimp, Paint.net and many others. Some require purchasing, and others are available for free as open source software on the internet.